In “At the End of the Getaway,” Belmondo walks past a huge billboard for “Ten Seconds From Hell,” Aldrich's film starring Jeff Chandler and Jack Palance. In “Le petit soldat”, a wall shows off the cover of a magazine in which Brigitte Bardot appears. Shortly after, Bardot and Palance would participate in "The Contempt". In “Vivre sa vie”, Anna Karina brags about having starred in a movie with Eddie Constantine. Two years later, Karina and Constantine would work together in "Lemmy against Alphaville". As you can see, Jean-Luc Godard's movie quotes even came out unintentionally, presciently. Wanting, Godard's referential corpus is impressive, of universal deluge. “Johnny Guitar”, Nicholas Ray's classic, is the film that appears the most times in the dialogues of his works.
But who was Godard? What is Godard? Writer and film critic, director and screenwriter, essayist, thinker, philosopher, sociologist, semiotician, poet, historian, romantic, narcissist, actor, avant-garde, polemicist, irritant, classic, modern, postmodern, melancholic, visionary, bewitching, misanthropic... Some of these qualities contradict each other because he was also contradictory. And, above all and above all, he was Godardian, the most Godardian of filmmakers, just as Hitchcock is the most Hitchcokian and Fellini the most Fellinian. What were his themes? War (the Nazi holocaust, Vietnam), money (Belmondo's hands and his coins, his economic precariousness, in "At the End of the Escape"), love, language (in Godard, "language becomes argument" , Enrique Brasó wrote), work, the factory, capitalist consumerism, the Maoist revolution, prostitution… And his gestures? Dancing, smoking, combing your hair, lifting skirts, playing tag, watching the world from the window... Some called him a misogynist. Perhaps. But few images printed on celluloid illustrate female freedom as vividly as those of Jean Seberg selling his newspaper on the Champs-Élysées or Karina, looking like a schoolboy, cycling through the streets.
Life and thought circulate in all the artist's shots from his first feature film, "At the End of the Escape", to his last, "The Picture Book", going through very different stages: fiction cinema, political cinema (the " agitprop”, May 68, the Dziga Vertov group), the video essay (the prodigious and devastating “Numéro deux”), television, periodic return to fiction and much, much “film collage”, whose peak is its incomparable “Histoire(s) du cinéma”, the bible of the seventh art according to his personal perspective. Always attentive to the society of his time and to the aesthetic composition: no one has ever worked on the shot, the framing, the montage and the sound with the rigor and conscience (or self-awareness) of the master Godard, with humor at times: the giant label which announces CINE and which, with a slight movement of the camera to the left, becomes PISCINE in its episode of “Rogopag”.
